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Episcopal Church, Gay rights, Gene Robinson, Human Rights Council, Institute on Religion and Democracy, IRD Blog, Jeff Walton, Marriage Equality, same sex marriage, San Diego, Washington DC
(Photo credit: Cornell University)
By Jeff Walton
Recently Bishop Gene Robinson attended incognito a worship service at an evangelical mega church in San Diego.
“It was so paranoid,” the Episcopal Church’s first openly partnered homosexual bishop recalled of his experience at Skyline church, which he had been invited to speak at as part of a panel discussion on marriage later that day. “It seemed like the service was all about stoking up their anxiety and their fear.”
Robinson conversed with a family who recognized him; the family expressing belief in the teachings of the church, but also sharing admiration…
Read more here.
If you read any book by liberal or “emergent” Christians, you’ll encounter the words “hate” and “hostility” several times per page – when they are referring to evangelicals. Someone like the saintly Bishop Robinson, in visiting evangelical churches, is certainly going to see what he is prepared to see. Speaking as an evangelical, I don’t encounter a lot of haters in our churches, but no doubt he is more sensitive to it than I am.
He says that “It’s not enough to have your existence grudgingly approved of.” In other words, tolerance ain’t enough – we want “celebration and joy that the other exists.” Why, pray tell? Why must anyone “celebrate” someone else’s subculture, and why should anyone with a traditional view of marriage feel compelled to celebrate a “marriage” we don’t regard as valid in the eyes of God? If I lived next to two lesbians, I would treat them with the respect I would treat anyone. If they invited me to their “wedding,” I would decline, and if they took offense, so be it. I think any individual person has the right to “celebrate” what he chooses. Darned if I would stay in a denomination when a bishop, supposedly one of the church’s spiritual leaders, orders me to feel “joy” when two men “marry.”
Here is someone so mired in his own subcultures (one religious, one social – but they overlap) that he has no clue that John and Betty down at Trinity Episcopal (or BigBox Evangelical) can’t help but react to this in-your-face attitude, because, well, they realize it isn’t Christian to browbeat people that you ought to regard as your spiritual brothers and sisters. The Episcopalians, who may eventually be a small enough group to meet in a phone booth, can’t grasp that what the feminists and gay activists have done to their denomination is make a lot of straight parishioners uncomfortable and peeved that their church has been turned into an arena for pressure groups instead a community of Christians. Having forgotten Christian virtues like humility (and, I dare even say, tolerance), the activists lament people’s “fear” and “hostility,” unable to grasp that people tire of church politics based on the “squeaky wheel” principle.
Memo to the bishop: when you unhook your church from the Bible and two thousand years of Christian tradition, bad things happen. Don’t blame us “reactionaries.” Blame yourself. Decent people don’t like being told we are “hate-filled” and “homophobic.”